Understandably a lot of people have been asking for what I use for tracking rankings. I had trouble finding a low cost solution because I’ve been using market samurai myself because I bought it a long time ago back when I started and was using it for keyword research (I stopped using it many months ago for that purpose). However, it’s $100-150 and that’s very expensive for a rank tracking tool. I know a lot of people like to promote it in the SEO world but the truth is while you feel “powerful” using it because it can do so much… I find it just slows me down switching between all the tabs/waiting 1+ minute per keyword search etc. The free google keyword tool does a search in 10 seconds and it takes 5 seconds to download that .csv file and eventually you upload them all to TKA’s niche refinery and sort them by competition. Market samurais competition research in the keyword tool does not take into account the top 3 or 5 (which is all I care about) but rather the number of competing pages with your keyword in their title/url etc. It’s really near useless information as far as I’m concerned, I have to put the limit very high because you can miss a lot of good keywords which can simply be targeted by a lot of super low quality sites.
SeoMoz for quick keyword searches from anywhere
Previously, as a free keyword rank checker when I did not have access to MS or when I wanted a quick rank checking update I would use seomoz’s tool. However, this is not an ideal solution if you want to use it for all your keywords on a weekly/daily basis because you are limited to 5 keywords per day. You need to pay $100/month for the PRO version which would allow you more keywords.
SeoBook’s Keyword Rank Checker
So, I finally found a good FREE keyword rank checker tool that seems to work really well as a plugin for firefox. It’s from Seobook and here’s a link to the tool. Great blog to read by the way for general SEO news, though things are often a big negative these days over there :P. You do have to register a free account first to be able to download any of their stuff but it’s no big deal. I don’t think I even ever get any emails from them about lame product promotions or whatever if you’re worried about that.
Anyway, it’s very easy to set up and it works with firefox 4 (which I love but I still use alongside chrome). To see the toolbar make sure to go to view — > toolbars –> Add-on bar and you should see the rank checker icon at the bottom right. Or if you do not want to see it in your toolbar alongside your other addons just do tools — > rank checker –> run.
It’s very simple to use, just make sure to “save” your keywords by groups. For example, all my niche 1 website keywords are saved together as “niche name”. Then you can just re-open that group of keywords at any time to re-run it to track ranking changes. I personally only track my rankings on Google most of the time. I track hundreds of keywords so enabling yahoo or Bing would just make it even slower. I do check Bing from time to time as a curiosity since they do have 30% of the US market share apparently nowadays.
If you are getting banned from Google because you are tracking too many keywords make sure to increase the delay from the default “2” (which I assume is 2 seconds). Since one of my website has 150-200 keywords to track I usually have to increase the delay ;).
Let me know how this works for you guys, from my limited testing it looks like a great free solution and I haven’t found any problems.
awesome, thanks man.
I would say you can check out sescout.com
They have a free plan that is pretty good and automatically updates on its own.
I personally use it for all my sites but thanks for this because I will be using this as well.
Thank you for this! I have a question though. I rank 45 for one of my keywords. So I search for my keyword and go to the 4th and 5th page and can’t find my webpage on there. So what exactly does this 45 mean?
That happens for some keywords because they can vary from where you search them and the tool’s datacenter location (or something like that). Try out seomoz’s 5 a day for that keyword and see what it gives you. If they both say you are n the 40s that’s a good sign that you are indeed there.
Hi. So how is http://thekeywordacademy.com/. What doe sthe niche refinery keyword tool do? What does it use to judge the competition of the top 3-5. I was just looking for mostly pr and also backlinks that show up in YSE.
Was thinking of outsourcing keywords too.
TKA has some ebooks/videos on helping you understand the basics of SEO (Most of what I do is similar to TKA with a few variations such as I use a lot of networks). Niche refinery is part of their tools and it can sort keywords you upload to it by $ potential and competition. It only uses PR as a way to judge competition. It’s not the best thing since ideally I would like something that checks PR + the number of backlinks with my keyword as anchor text to that website but so far nothing exists that is that precise so I do it manually when I find a few keywords with PR ranges I want to compete with which depend a lot how much I want to rank for the keyword… I’ll go higher difficulty like PR4+ for 10k+ monthly search keywords for example.
Hey Alex, have you seen Brad Callen’s keyword tool which claims to take into account a lot of other factors?
http://www.warriorforum.com/warrior-special-offers-forum/349975-2-579-sold-brand-new-niche-finder-tool-brad-callen-already-100s-warrior-testimonials.html
The videos look pretty good, was wondering if you have heard anything about it?
Steve.
I tried it, not too confident in his keyword tool factoring a lot of things, I tried a few keywords I ranked for and some did not match his difficulty label and ultimately I wouldn’t let a tool like that decide and sort keywords for me. TBH I’m highly skeptical of all of brad’s products. I like to think hes an honest man but he seems a marketer focused on selling his products more than anything. Saying he has a “super secret code” to analyze competition simply translates as “I look at the number of competing pages in google searches” to determine difficulty. Not sure if that’s true or not but if he shared his “secret code” to analyze competition I would at least have an idea why for some keywords it did not reflect the real difficulty I had in reaching #1 for them (sometimes they were easier or sometimes harder than what the tool said).
Hey bro, you don’t have your own product right, so you promote other people’s product? Thanks.
Ya I don’t have any products and I don’t have plans for any currently, I would rather put the info on my blog than do a course with lame sales page that say 37, no, 12 left!!! price increase in 5 hours!!! blah blah.
I might offer consultation eventually though, a lot of people have been asking me about that. Currently I don’t have the time and I want to increase my own passive income.
Yeah, bro I feel you. I don’t want to create a product. I rather just create a site and write a few articles then cash flow lol. I see like for some people they make their own product then people opt in and that’s it as it is FREE. Some of the people that does that, just promote other people products like a product launch, or never to get updated through opting in.
Alex, how’s your sites going? i saw some people on IM forums complain about huge ranking drop for big number of MNS in the begining of this month..have you had any sites deindexed ?
I haven’t really touched my older sites in a month now besides a link building service using SEnuke and some article distribution on a few keywords that are part of those websites and they have only increased in traffic overall, I’ll have a post up soon on my monthly income from last month.
hrm market samurai seems to be able to do the page rank and backlinks in YSE. But it can’t mass check keywords that’s the only problem.
Thanks for this!
i use sescout , i think it shows the best results ,,,,,rank checker aint that accurate,,,i tried it
Hi Alex,
How you doin.
I recently updated to Firefox V5, BIG mistake.
Lots of bugs, can use some plugin & lost Rank Checker.
I downloaded Rank Checker, it dissappeared after a couple of days so I downloaded it again but its now gone, again.
Any ideas Alex??
Maybe I’m better off going back the Firefox 4
Peter
Try http://www.rankerizer.com/, it’s free in exchange for an opt in to Matt and Brad Callens’s list. I would be very weary of all their promotions though, they are huge on email mkt with all selling tons of different methods so don’t get too distracted 🙂